Does the NFL want to be Ali-Frazier?

That fight montage before Ravens-Steelers struck me too. It yet again evidences something Josh implicitly points out—the NFL's always-fraught relationship with violence. On the one hand they want to market themselves as Ali vs. Frazier. On the other they want to fine players for taking an Ali vs. Frazier mentality. The players seem to get the game. When Cris Collinsworth basically said all bets were off, he was pointing out that the players will take the fines and keep trucking. Some of what we call "helmet to helmet" is virtually unavoidable anyway. (Maybe that Ray Lewis hit Tom describes?) I don't really know how you play football and never have an unintentional helmet-to-helmet collision.

But the NFL deeply understands why masses of people come to watch their product—at least, most of the time it does. In the wake of Tim Tebow's quasi-redemption, it's worth thinking some about the "Good vs. Evil" marketing the league put on his game against the Lions, and this Times piece on why people tend to love/hate Tebow:

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As vice president at Nielsen Sports, Stephen Master measures an athlete's endorsement potential based on awareness and appeal. Nationally, the company tested Tebow after the draft in 2010 and again before this season. Coming out of college, Tebow recorded an N-score of 141, "an incredible rating," Master said, "M.V.P.-like."

In the second test, Tebow's N-score fell to a 41, which still ranks high. His positive appeal, though, dropped to 76 percent from 85 percent, while his negative appeal increased to 24 percent from 15 percent. Under negative appeal comments, responders wrote "overrated" and "annoying" and "overexposed" and "religious nut job."

The piece mainly focuses on the "religious nut job" portion of Tebow-hate, but I think there's something else. The league is no stranger to overtly religious athletes. Indeed Kurt Warner is quoted in the piece addressing the issue. But I think a lot of the Tebow-hate comes out of his draft position and hype relative to his skills. I wouldn't pass a verdict, right now, though I'm skeptical. But I think it's worth noting that Kurt Warner won a Super Bowl before any of us knew much about him. Tebow meanwhile was making pro-life ads before he'd thrown an NFL pass. Now he is up against something more than whatever we think of his religious practices. I don't recall, for instance, anyone billing Kurt Warner vs. Jevon Kearse as "Good vs. Evil."

There's also this sense that athletes must embody some sort of deeper moral quotient beyond winning and losing. Not to steer this away too far, but you see that in Dave Anderson's piece today on Joe Frazier in which he argues not simply that Frazier was a better fighter than Ali (despite losing two out of three) but that he was actually "a better man." I don't think we've learned to separate questions of morality from questions of winning. Michael Jordan was a bit of an asshole. Ali embraced some really scuzzy racialist tactics in pursuit of winning. But there's nothing inherently noble or "classy" about sports. Let Tebow win a few games and break a few records and I think all of this will disappear. Then we'll all gladly endure the puffy pre-game features in which we're told he's such a "nice guy."

The Buildup to the Fight of the Century

Boxing legend Joe Frazier died Monday night, at age 67, after a battle with liver cancer. He will be forever remembered for defeating Muhammad Ali in March 1971, the Fight of the Century at Madison Square Garden. LIFE.com shares photos from that monumental fight and reflections from photographer John Shearer. Shearer chronicled not only the fight itself, but the utterly divergent worlds inhabited by both men in the months leading up to the match. Here, Ali taunts the champ at Frazier’s own training headquarters in Pennsylvania. Of this photo -- one of few here that were published before the fight -- Shearer told LIFE.com that "it came to represent, in a way, what was about to happen. The talk is about to be put aside. Frazier didn’t do any of the things that Ali spent half of his time doing. He would never dream of going to Ali’s camp and clowning around. I often wondered ... if Ali finally realized what he was in for as he tried to poke fun at Joe, and Joe just glared back, his fist clenched."

Correction, Nov. 8, 2011: Due to an editing error, this slideshow stated that Frazier knocked out Ali. Though he knocked Ali down in the 15th round of the fight, Frazier won via unanimous decision.

CREDIT:

John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures.

The Relentless Champ

Frazier works out on the speed bag before his March 8, 1971 title defense. This photo perfectly captures the champ’s trademark fighting style -- crouching, weaving, aggressive, relentless. Ali too was relentless in his own way -- namely, in his unseemly verbal abuse of Frazier, whom he compared to a "gorilla" and called an "Uncle Tom" who was "too ugly" to be a world champion. Shearer proffers one explanation for Frazier’s punishing training regimen: "Joe Frazier felt that he had a lot to prove. He really wanted to shut Ali up."

CREDIT:

John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures.

Frazier and His Knockouts, January 1971

"The two places Frazier communicates best," wrote LIFE’s Thomas Thompson in a March 1971 cover story, "are in the ring, when a cloak of menace and fury drops over him, and on a nightclub stage, where he sings with strength and sincerity." Music, one of the Knockouts said in the same article, "has brought Joe out, made him a little nicer to people, a little more comfortable to be around."

John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures.

They Come to It at Last

As he would throughout most of the early rounds, Ali pummels Frazier with jabs and hooks to the head. "The crowd," Shearer told LIFE.com, "thought Joe wasn't going to land a glove on Ali. Going in, Joe knew that the crowd was going to be with Ali. From the outset, he made it a point to take that power away from Ali, as if to say, 'Look, I can take your punches. You can hit me as much as you like, it's not going to bother me in the slightest. I'm going to keep coming.' And pretty quickly it was clear to just about everybody -- at ringside, at least -- that this was going to be a different fight than almost everybody expected."

John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures.

Artful Dodger

Frazier throws a hook that Ali -- his hands, as usual, at his belt -- artfully dodges. By the middle rounds, Frazier had taken a pounding, enduring barrage after barrage of Ali's quick, neck-snapping shots to the head. But through every round, Frazier kept coming, and coming, and coming -- hammering away at Ali's body, shaking off blow after blow to the face, crouching, weaving, always moving forward, pushing Ali back, a relentless force. Frazier had trained for so long with such tenacity and drive that it was clear he was ready and able to fight very, very hard to the bitter end of the scheduled 15-round bout.

Stoic even in victory over his nemesis, heavyweight champion Joe Frazier makes himself presentable in his dressing room after the fight. "Frazier didn't fight by going for the head, which a lot of other boxers did," Shearer says. "He went after Ali's body the whole fight, pounding away, taking terrible blows to the head. You know, you keep whacking at the base of the tree, and the tree is going to come down. And that's the story of their first fight."